Buddhists in Bars with Balloons
Sunday December 30, 2007
If you are out celebrating New Year’s Eve tomorrow night, as you are elbowing your way to the bar, listen out for the sounds of other-worldly chanting: it may be a cohort of Buddhists come to enlighten you as you relax with your friends.
According to the BBC website, Buddhist monk Hogen Natori and his companions have organised a regular spot in a jazz bar in Tokyo where they perform chanting for the gathered crowd, and then in the interval hang out with the audience, drinking and smoking, chatting and, er… making balloon sculptures. Hogen Natori is unconcerned by criticisms that such behaviour is unbefitting of serious Buddhists. Over a cigarette, he explained to BBC reporters that people “think Buddhism is very difficult, and deep and serious, but Buddhism is much more than that – exciting, funny even. I want to spread this kind of teaching.”
The pious can rest easy in their beds, however. According to my learned sources here at thinkBuddha (and I assure you that they are very learned indeed), there is no single Vinaya rule that specifically forbids the making of balloon sculptures.
I wonder if this raises an interesting question about the connection in the West between religion and high seriousness. But that, of course, is a terribly serious question. So instead of worrying about things like that, I’m going for a cigarette and a stiff whisky, and then I’ll have a go at making some Buddhas out of balloons.
Cheers!
Image of balloon sculpture courtesy of Wikipedia
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Worldly Transcendence
Monday December 24, 2007
Next term, I am following up my ten week course on consciousness with a course on happiness, and I’m looking forward to the experience. As a result, I’ve been reading a fair amount on the subject of happiness, the most recent book being Richard Layard’s Happiness: Lessons from a New Science
One thing that struck me about the book is that Layard refers several times to belief in God as a contributing to happiness. If this is supported by a sufficient weight of empirical research, then this is an intriguing result for a more or less cheerful materialist such as myself.
Before looking at this claim more deeply, there are, however, three things that we should immediately be aware of. The first is the we cannot justifiably move from saying “belief in God is a factor that can contribute to happiness” to saying “belief in God is true.” The second is that, even if there is a correlation between belief in God and happiness, this does not mean that belief in God is either a necessary or a sufficient condition for happiness. And the third is that there may be goods other than personal happiness. It is conceivable that there could exist extremely happy zealots who are committed to making the lives of non-believers a misery; and if we say, “Well, they can’t be truly happy, then,” we have to also acknowledge that we need to look more closely at the idea of happiness behind these research findings.
There may, however, be something in Layard’s claim. Although I do not see that there is evidence for belief in God as either a necessary or a sufficient condition for happiness, some philosophers – reeling in the wake of Nietzsche’s supposed death of God – have proclaimed that what is left to us in a Godless universe is unmitigated grimness. In my last post, I mentioned Bertrand Russell’s claims that we lived in a universe of “unyielding despair”. Here, for the record, is the full quote:
That Man is the product of causes which had no preview of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the souls’s habitation henceforth be safely built
Need we choose between God and unyielding despair? I think not. We need to ask what particular role belief in God may perform within any particular life, and how this role may contribute to happiness. And here Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman’s book Character Strength and Virtues: A Handbook and a Classification
- Wisdom and Knowledge
- Courage
- Humanity
- Justice
- Temperance
- Transcendence
It is the last of these that I am interested in here because – although perhaps not a virtue (Owen Flanagan points this out, claiming that transcendence does not provoke any particular kind of action which would make it a virtue, whilst humanity, courage etc. do) – transcendence does seem to me to be, in some sense, necessary to ethics, well-being and happiness. But transcendence is not necessarily an otherworldly business of God, gods and strange, ethereal powers. We can have a thoroughly naturalistic understanding of transcendence. Seligman and Peterson give the following aspects of transcendence, which they understand as strengths that connect us to meaning and to a sense of the larger universe:
- Appreciation of beauty and excellence (awe, wonder etc.)
- Gratitude
- Hope
- Humour
- Spirituality (sense of purpose, faith)
Appreciation of beauty, awe, gratitude, hope, a sense of purpose, humour… The list is a good one. These are things that are well worth having, and seem to me to be essential components of a happy life. But they are not things that need to be founded upon a belief in God or gods. Some of them may indeed be nurtured by some forms of religious belief and practice, but other forms of religious belief and practice may erode them. There are certain religious circles, for example, where humour is not exactly the order of the day.
If we understand transcendence in this broad sense, then perhaps it is not only a factor that contributes to happiness, but also a necessary condition of happiness. These are the roots that we need to nurture if we value happiness at all. We would do well to resist the gloomy atheism of Bertrand Russell, on the grounds that it lacks sufficient understanding of the psychological bases of a happy and flourishing existence. But that does not mean that God needs to be brought back into the picture. A worldly transcendence is transcendence enough.
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Nutters?
Wednesday November 28, 2007
In a recent interview on BBC1, former prime minister, Tony Blair, confessed what we all already knew – that his vision whilst in government was strongly underpinned by his religious faith. And yet, during his term as prime minister, he was more than a little coy about admitting these religious underpinnings. As Alasdair Campbell famously said, “We don’t do God.”
This mixture of conviction and coyness says a lot about the attitude to religion in the UK. Many of the faithful complain that we are a society that is anti-religion, but I do not think that the evidence supports this. We still live in a society in which the Anglican church and the state are tethered together and in which Anglican bishops have the automatic right to sit in the house of Lords. Those who hold high office are expected to be seen trooping in and out of the churches on Sunday: stolidly religious, but not demonstratively so. That seems to be how we like our politicians.
The attitude we hold with respect to religion in public life seems rather similar to our attitude to what are often called “family values”. Political commentators everywhere extol the virtues of the family as the fundamental moral unit (in this, echoing Margaret Thatcher’s famous claim that “There is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and families”), and as a result, we like our politicians married. We like it even more if they have children that they can pose with for photographs. But we don’t like to think of our politicians actually having sex. It is the exactly same with religion. On the one hand, we like our politicians, it seems, to be stolidly, institutionally religious. Yet at the same time, we don’t like to think of them manifesting any degree of unseemly enthusiasm for their religion. Religion, like sex, is something to be done in private, preferably with one’s socks still on.
This double attitude is unhelpful. Although there are many ideologues who claim that religion should be driven out of public life, I am not sure I agree that this is either possible or desirable. Certainly, I see no good argument for giving religion any kind of privileged place in public life, and there are no doubt good arguments for disestablishment of church and state, and for resisting any attempt to grant privileges and protections in law for those ideas and practices specifically judged to be religious. As I have argued before on this site, what needs to be protected is not religion, but people. I can see no reason why religious groups should be guaranteed any more protection or a priori influence in public life than any other group bound together by mutual interest – ornithologists, trainspotters and philosophers, for example.
Having said this, we need to allow that religion will – whether we like it or not – have a role to play in public life. Public life must be rooted in the lives of the public, and religion (like trainspotting, ornithology and philosophy) is just something that many people are bound up in – to use the old, and probably bogus, etymology of “religion” as rooted in the Latin religare, “to bind fast”. We may think religion is good for people, or we may not, and this question should be open to public debate and to investigation, but we should neither exclude it from public life nor should we grant it any kind of privileged role.
This public debate concerning religion cannot occur as long as we maintain a dual attitude by virtue of which we both want a role for religion, and at the same time we think it is inappropriate to discuss it. This tension is one that can drive the religiously motivated aspects of political life underground, and this means that the true reasons and motivations for action are no longer available to public scrutiny.
What is needed, I think, is the kind of honesty and courage that is so often lacking. Let those who hold public office and make decisions rooted in their religious convictions admit to the sources of their inspiration and account for themselves. And let those who lack religious convictions at last honestly admit to the fact (after all, how many openly atheist or agnostic politicians can you name?) Then, when we can see clearly and in the light of day the ideas, aspirations and motivations of those who are in power, and we can begin to have a more serious debate than is permitted by the pantomime of respectability we are accustomed to.
Had Mr. Blair been possessed of this degree of staightforwardness with respect to this issue, openly admitting to the extent to which he was influenced by his faith, explaining the nature of what was clearly a vitally important influence upon him, not attempting to disguise the issue, then it would have been up to the rest of us to have decided whether, in the end, the decisions he was making and the motivations that underpinned them were those of a man of some wisdom, whether they were, in his own words, those of a “nutter”, or whether the truth was somewhere in between. And this, in a democracy, seems to be only appropriate.
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New Review: The Sutras of Abu Ghraib
Tuesday October 30, 2007
I have not written a review for this site for a long time, so I’m very pleased to be posting a new review to the review section. The book under discussion is Aidan Delgado’s account of Buddhism, Iraq and life in the US Army, The Sutras of Abu Ghraib
Click the following link to go to the review: Sutras of Abu Ghraib Review
Marvin Minsky's Dreams of Immortality
Wednesday October 17, 2007
This post is part of a series concerning Marvin Minsky, Transhumanism and the New Scientist. Please read all three posts together before commenting. The other two posts can be found here and here .
My consciousness course rolls on, and this week we are talking about the question of AI and machine consciousness. So when I was looking through the New Scientist a few days ago, I noticed the name of Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of the AI labs at MIT over in the States. The article, on closer inspection, was a damned curious one. The subject was one about which I confess I know little: transhumanism, which Wikipedia calls “an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of new sciences and technologies to enhance human mental and physical abilities and aptitudes, and ameliorate what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as stupidity, suffering, disease, ageing and involuntary death.” Stupidity, suffering, disease, ageing and involuntary death: that’s quite a list.
The New Scientist article was reporting from the World Transhumanist Association meeting in Chicago. The meeting is clearly a forum for a discussion of ideas that are deliberately provocative and outlandish (solving the problem of the population explosion by “uploading” ten million people onto 50-cent computer chips, anyone?), and so it should perhaps be understood in this light; but at the same time it was curious, not to say disturbing, reading. It may be that suffering, stupidity, disease, ageing and involuntary death are undesirable. The jury, however, must remain out at the moment on the matter of whether they are unnecessary.
The author of the article, Danielle Egan, spoke with Professor Minsky in an attempt to throw a bit more light upon what this whole transhumanist business is about. After all, when we’ve sorted out the minor problem of death (not to mention stupidity, disease etc. etc.), then we have to wonder about what to do with the eternal life we are left with. “Ordinary citizens,” the Professor said, “wouldn’t know what to do with eternal life… The masses don’t have any clear-cut goals or purpose”. That would include me, I suppose. After all, what would I do with eternal life? Spend an eternity reading Husserl? Not on your life! Go for lots of long walks. That would pall. Learn to play the sitar. That would be nice for a few decades, perhaps, but after that, I’d get a bit tired. Write more books? Probably. Get myself into even more trouble than I already do? Almost certainly. Anyway, I don’t need to worry about this, because as Professor Minsky says, as one of the masses, I’m not really cut out for it. Only scientists, he goes on to claim, those who are chewing away at important problems that can take years and years to solve, might be in need of eternity.
What is more worrying, is that Professor Minsky also claimed in the interview not only should scientists be exempt from death, but also from the kinds of fragile understandings and agreements that bind us together at all. “Scientists shouldn’t have ethical responsibility for their inventions,” he boldly asserts, “they should be able to do what they want. You shouldn’t ask them to have the same values as other people”.
Scientists should be allowed to do what they want? Is this as scientists? Or is it as human beings? Either way, I’m unconvinced. Scientists are not a breed apart who live divorced from the world. They are a part of a complex world of social interactions. They take money from funding bodies to do various kinds of work that is more or less of benefit to mankind. These funding bodies may have more or less wholesome agendas. If chairman of ACME Torture Instruments Plc. offers me a nice, comfortable job to explore human responses to pain stimuli, or if the board of Bomb-U-Like Ltd. employ me to find a way of wiping out an entire nation, intelligently stopping this destruction at some pre-programmed geographical border, then I can hardly claim that my research is ethically neutral.
Transhumanism, or at least Minsky’s brand of Transhumanism, is the kind of thing that gives science a bad name, and that fuels the popular myth – one that many scientists lament – of the deranged scientist in his or her (although, in the mental image we have, it is usually his ) lair, pressing buttons, playing with steaming test-tubes and cackling insanely over having found the elixir of immortality, without a moment’s thought about the ethical consequences of their actions.
But, having said that, I’m not sure it that Minsky is talking about science at all, even if he thinks he is. Immortal life, the ending of suffering, the overcoming of death, the salvation of humanity, the attainment of a state free from our ordinary, human stupidity, and a priesthood who are curiously exempt from the ethical standards of the rest of mankind… This, Professor Minsky, sounds more like bad religion than it sounds like good science.
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Happiness
Friday October 12, 2007
Although it is only October, I have already been planning what philosophy courses I would like to teach in 2008, and a few days ago decided that it might be fun to spend ten weeks looking at the philosophy of happiness.
So when I picked up the newspaper today, I was interested to see that a recent report on children aged seven to eleven in the UK shows that kids of this age over here suffer from a “pervasive anxiety” and high levels of stress (see, for example, the BBC report). Coupled with the Unicef report earlier this year that shows that children in the UK are at the bottom of the list for “child well-being” (see the article here) one has to wonder what is going wrong.
Of course, it should be said that happiness is difficult to measure, and we should also be aware of the dangers of having an overly romantic view of childhood. I, too, remember staggering levels of pervasive anxiety during my own childhood. Nevertheless, the report does not seem to be particularly good news, and the initial response to the report seems far from promising. When asked about the findings, a spokeswoman from the Department for Children, Families and Schools responded as follows:
The vast majority of children go to better schools, enjoy better health, live in better housing and in more affluent households than they did ten years ago.
What the measure for “better schools” is, I do not know. And perhaps it is true that housing and health have improved over the last ten years – although with enormous growth in childhood obesity in the UK, I’m not sure about the last of these. Nevertheless, even if this is a correct assessment of the situation, it hardly touches the heart of the problem. Health, good housing, affluence: these are all good things, perhaps. But whether they are sufficient conditions for happiness (indeed, whether they are even necessary conditions) is a whole other question. And if the governmental response to genuine concerns such as these is only in terms of such an impoverished view of happiness, then the prognosis is not at all good.
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Religion, Violence and Dualism
Friday September 21, 2007
A few weeks ago, the New Scientist published an article by Helen Phillips called “What good is God?”, yet another contribution to current debates about the value of religion. The fundamental question that the article posed was this: if morality is, in a sense, hard-wired in the brain, then why do we need religion? “It seems,” Phillips writes, “we are born with a sense of right and wrong, and that no amount of religious indoctrination will change our most basic moral instincts.”
Phillips doesn’t exactly take the question head on. Instead she looks at the growing body of research on the connection between religion and morality. And, as always, the results of this research have been decidedly ambiguous. One the one hand, some studies seem to demonstrate that religion is a definite force for the good, and on the other hand, other studies suggest that it has decidedly negative consequences.
The more research takes place, the more it seems that religion and morality interact in hugely complicated ways. Phillips cites an interesting study by Gary Jensen that suggests that there is a correlation (not necessarily a causal connection) between homicide rates and forms of religion. Jensen’s research considered homicide rates in “dualist nations” (in which beliefs in both God and the devil were prevalent) “God-only” nations (in which beliefs in God were prevalent, but not in the devil) and “secular nations” (in which beliefs in God were not prevalent). Although it is broad-brush research, the article is intelligently argued, and a welcome break from the unedifying spectacle of believers and atheists alike trying to pin various Crimes of the Century on the other camp. Jensen writes that,
when the moral and religious universe encompassing individuals involves cosmic struggles between benevolent and malevolent forces, moral struggles between “good guys” and “bad-guys,” and dichotomous choices between good or evil, then there is little or no inclination to consider any middle ground, negotiation, or flexibility in dealing with lesser conflicts and struggles in everyday life. It may be that a religious cosmology with moral “wars” and “dueling deities” sets the stage for culture wars, facilitates interpersonal wars, and encourages people in conflict to think in terms of dueling contenders for righteousness…
What is interesting here is that we are actually no longer arguing between the two poles of religion vs. atheism, but looking instead at the problems of a form of moral dualism. The simplistic idea of a struggle between “good guys” and “bad guys” may or may not be overtly religious, but the evidence seems to be that it is particularly destructive. Indeed, Jensen’s research suggests that the difference in homicide rates between secular and God-only nations is statistically insignificant; whilst the difference between these two and dualist nations is much greater.
[T]he high dualist nations have the highest homicide score followed by the lesser dualist nations with God-Only and secular nations exhibiting lower scores. However, the statistically significant contrast is between the dualist nations and the God-Only and secular nations. Relative to dualist nations, nations with a sizeable percentage believing in God (but not the Devil) have a significantly lower score. The most secular nations exhibit a significantly lower score than dualist nations as well. But, contrary to Paul’s emphasis on secular versus religious nations… there is no difference between the non-dualist, God believing nations, and the relatively more secular nations.
Such a picture does nothing either for those who would like to see the whole world secularised, nor does it do much for those who think that all heathens such as myself need to do is to return to the fold, and everything will be set to rights. Instead it seems to suggest that lethal violence becomes a problem when what is lost is moral nuance, an understanding of moral complexity. If Jensen is right, and of course further research is necessary, the problem is not so much religion as dualism. And so the question that we must ask about our religious and secular texts and ideas is perhaps this: do they foster this dualism, or do they seek to break it down?
So perhaps it is really not that useful to talk about religion versus secularism. Perhaps what we need to do instead is to renounce our loftier ideals (whether religious or secularist) and to ask some more pragmatic questions about the fine grain of our lives: what are the forms of belief and of practice that conduce to kindness and the cessation of harm? Because this kind of question and the close attention that it requires is often seriously neglected in such discussions. The propensity to morality may be hard-wired in the brain. So may the propensity to violence. So may the propensity to various forms of religion. So may the propensity to various forms of secularism. But surely the urgent matter is that of how we are to navigate our way through all of this so that we might be able to bring a little more kindness, a little more breathing space, into the world.
Image: WikiMedia Commons
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